The key Challenges for Managing Knowledge in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Public Sector Organisations

Management challenges do not come any bigger for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) public and private sector organizations than the current one. The Kingdom is currently facing unprecedented challenges, both fiscally and in its demographics, with heightened competition in the energy market and a big increase in the number of Saudis reaching working age. After a decade of sustained oil-based growth, KSA is at a transition towards knowledge- based economy. Today, achieving that goal has become essential. To address change challenges, knowledge is increasingly accessed and shared across different functional departments and professionals. This knowledge interdependence creates new management challenges resulting from the risks and difficulties of knowledge transactions across boundaries. Providing access to key tacit and explicit knowledge to decision makers during potential changes seems to be critical for effective decision-making. Recent technological developments have made a significant and positive impact on the ability and desire to manage knowledge. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to critically appraise and document the main challenges associated with managing knowledge in the KSA public sector organizations. A web based, online questionnaire survey method was employed to collect data. Descriptive analysis was used to analyse the data obtained from the 107 completed and usable questionnaire for inference and conclusion. The results show that all challenges for managing knowledge, apart from lack of knowledge management framework and lack of business case for knowledge management, are not significant (>0.05), and therefore, there are no significant statistical variations between the responses of the `directors' and `managers'. The paper concludes that to gain competitive advantage, it is necessary for KSA public sector decision makers to recognise the ultimate key to organisations successfully embracing KM initiatives into daily operation is leadership. Effective leadership requires a particular set of attributes that enables to extract ideas and knowledge from stakeholders and transfer this knowledge into organisational assets.